Europundits: I had lost track of Europundits, a fine group blog from guess-where, and reading it today I came across some amazing recent posts.

: First, Nelson Ascher writes that one problem with the middle east conflict is branding:

I know that what I’m going to say is rather simplistic. But, sometimes, really complex things have simple roots.

Why has the Arab PR been working so much better than the Jewish one?

Maybe it’s a question of brands….

When Jews were known as Jews, they were despised. Then they became Israelis and they were backed, even admired. Now they are hated as Zionists and are beginning to be called Jews again.

While the Arabs were known as Arabs there wasn’t much sympathy for them. When they managed to make themselves be called Palestinians, they became a small, oppressed people with whose tragic situation it was almost impossible not to empathize.

The interesting point is that this change of brands happened simultaneously, basically after the 1967 victory. The Israelis became Zionists, while the Arabs metamorphosed into Palestinians. The Arab-Israeli conflict was transformed into the oppression and genocide of poor Palestinians by cruel Zionists.

Read the rest.

: And then there’s this post that tears France a new you-know-what and concludes:

Over the past year, there has been a tendency for Americans to take the European backlash personally. This is myopic. Together with Arabs, Africans and our neighbors in North and South America, we Americans are the bastards of Europe